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OTTAWA — Canada needs stronger cybersecurity and data protection efforts to guard the integrity of its elections and its citizens’ personal information, according to the whistleblower at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

Christopher Wylie told a House of Commons committee Tuesday that Cambridge Analytica was just the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to shadowy use of citizens’ data to try and sway elections.

“Cambridge Analytica is the beginning, it’s not the end,” said Wylie, the Canadian who helped set up the company in 2013.

“What CA has exposed is how easy it is to … take funds from mysterious sources and then go interfere with elections in cyberspace. What it really shows is how the internet and the growing digitization of society has opened up vulnerabilities in our election system.”

Cambridge Analytica has been accused of making use of data harvested from millions of Facebook users, without their knowledge or consent, to provide “psychographic” analysis of voters to political campaigns. The company and its affiliates had clients in numerous countries, but are most commonly connected to the “Leave” campaign in the Brexit referendum and several key players around Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

An estimated 87 million Facebook users had their data harvested through a personality quiz app, including 622,161 Canadians. Under Facebook’s terms and conditions at the time, however, the researcher behind the app could obtain data not just from those who took the quiz, but their extended social network.

Wylie, a British Columbia-born political operative, helped establish Cambridge Analytica. He had previously worked in the offices of Liberal leaders Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff, but told MPs Tuesday his work didn’t involve psychographic profiling or the micro-targeting of voters.

Wylie, who now lives in the U.K., said the growth of the internet, social media platforms and the increasing digitization of citizens’ personal lives have made it easier create division among voters.

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“Previously, if you were a foreign actor, you’d have to physically come to a country to interfere (with an election). Now you don’t,” Wylie said.

“So I think moving forward we need to look at cybersecurity as a priority for elections, and that we have to understand that we may look at social media, as domestic political players, as a communications space … If you’re a malicious foreign actor, you look it as an information battlefield.

“So you don’t look at these people as voters, you look at them very much as targets for manipulation and targets for division.”

The Liberal government recently tabled legislation to change Canada’s election laws, including measures it said are aimed at protecting the integrity of the 2019 vote.

Bill C-76 would put limits on the political activities of third-party pressure groups, and forbid those groups from accepting foreign funding to fuel their activities during an election period — although critics argue that doesn’t go far enough.

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The legislation also forbids companies that sell advertising space from “knowingly” accepting domestic political ads from foreign entities. And it requires parties to create privacy policies, including revealing what information they collect — although there remains no independent oversight of parties’ data practices.

When asked if Canadian political parties should be subject to the country’s privacy laws — they currently aren’t — Wylie cautioned against creating an overly restrictive environment for parties’ legitimate voter outreach efforts.

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